Reform vs Rehabilitationa project by Hayden

Reform vs Rehabilitation: what American prisons actually do

Welcome Ms. Raf! So this is a website I made for class about the difference between reform and rehabilitation in prisons, and which one the U.S. actually focuses on. Spoiler: it's not really the one that works. I'll explain what each word means, what happens inside American jails, and how other countries do it differently.

Thanks for reading. If you find a typo, no you didn't.

Some numbers first

• Around 1.9 million people are locked up in the U.S. right now.
• That's about 664 per 100,000 people — more than any other country.
• Almost half of people released get arrested again within a year.
• We spend roughly $80 billion a year on prisons.

(numbers from BJS and the Prison Policy Initiative, look it up)

Okay so what's the difference?

Reform

Reform is basically the punishment side. The idea is that if you commit a crime, you get punished hard enough that you (and other people watching) won't want to do it again. Think long sentences, tough conditions, harder labor. It's about the crime, not really the person who did it. The old word for prison is "penitentiary," which literally comes from "penitent" — like, sit alone in a cell and feel bad about what you did.

Rehabilitation

Rehabilitation is more like, okay this person is going to get out eventually, so what kind of person do we want walking back into our neighborhood? It focuses on actually fixing what led to the crime — addiction treatment, mental health care, school, job training. It treats the person, not just the crime. Countries like Norway and Germany do this and their re-arrest rates are way lower than ours.

Which one does America focus on?

Punishment. Pretty clearly. The U.S. has done a few things over the last 50 years that locked us into this:

1971 — War on Drugs. Nixon called drugs "public enemy number one" and a lot of people who probably needed rehab ended up in prison instead.
1974 — the "Nothing Works" report. A guy named Robert Martinson published a study that people read as "rehab is pointless." Lawmakers used it to switch to a punishment mindset (even though Martinson kinda walked it back later).
1984 — Sentencing Reform Act. Federal parole basically got killed and mandatory minimums took over, so judges couldn't really shorten sentences anymore.
1994 — Crime Bill. Billions of dollars went into building more prisons, and incarcerated people lost access to Pell Grants (so basically no more college in prison for a long time).

What's it actually like inside?

This is the part that surprised me the most while researching. If prisons were really trying to rehabilitate people, you'd expect a lot of school, therapy, and job training. But mostly it looks like this:

• Most people spend 18+ hours a day in a cell. Less than 4 hours of actual programming.
• Prison jobs pay something like 13 to 52 cents an hour, and they usually don't translate into a real job once you're out.
• There are more people with serious mental illness in jails than in all the country's psychiatric hospitals combined. Wild.
• Only about 6% of state prisons offer college classes, even though education is the #1 thing that keeps people from coming back.
• On any given day, around 80,000 people are in solitary. The UN says more than 15 days of solitary is torture.
• When you get released, you usually get $40, a bus ticket, and a felony record that blocks you from a ton of jobs and housing.

How do other countries compare?

I picked Norway and Germany because they're the ones my teacher kept bringing up. Their whole goal is to get people ready to come back into society, not just punish them.

	USA	Norway	Germany
Locked up per 100k people	664	54	67
Re-arrested within 3 years	68%	20%	33%
Longest sentence	Life w/o parole	21 yrs*	Life (with review)
Main goal of prison	Punishment	Rehab	Resocialization

* Norway can extend sentences 5 years at a time if the person is still considered dangerous, so it's not really "only 21 years."

"No one truly knows a nation until one has been inside its jails. A nation should not be judged by how it treats its highest citizens, but its lowest ones."

— Nelson Mandela (I know it's the most-used quote ever but it actually fits)

My take, for whatever it's worth

Like 95% of people in prison eventually get out. So the real question isn't whether they deserve to be punished — it's who do we want walking back into our towns? Right now we're basically taking people who messed up and giving them back to society angrier, less educated, and unable to get a job or a place to live. Then we act surprised when they get arrested again.

I'm not saying nobody should go to prison. Obviously some people are dangerous. But the stuff that actually lowers re-arrest rates isn't a secret:

→ Letting people go to school inside (cuts re-arrest by 43%)
→ Real mental health and addiction treatment
→ Job training that connects to actual jobs on the outside
→ Fixing mandatory minimums and bringing back parole
→ Helping people get housing and voting rights back when they get out

We already know what works. We just don't really do it. That's kinda the whole point of this project.